On the importance of rodents

Back when I was a kid, my dad would turn the cleaning process of his computer mouse into a bit of an exaggerated ceremony. He'd remove the trackball and place it in a shotglass full of water and a drop of dishsoap and stir around in it with a Q-tip. Sure, back then a computer was some kind of mythical machine, which would do wondrous things if treated right, so one did not simply anger the gods of hardware. A much more likely explanation for this scenario, however, is that my old man is just an attention whore.

Then came the optical mouse. Truly, we had reached a whole new age of technology! And they looked so incredible! Ahem...

Basically, we went from this...

to this...

and eventually even that.

0-1 thumb buttons, no sidescrolling mouse wheels (heck, I remember when even the damn wheels were a novelty), how the FUCK did we browse the web?
Simple. Most of us didn't.
When I finally started exploring humankind's largest porn collection some 16 or so years ago, the majority of the fun took place inside some shitty, tiny AOL window. "How do I get out of AOL and find the real internet?" was a borderline valid question back then.

So, why the fuck am I babbling on about ancient computer peripherals and crap? Because after about five years of service, my Logitech G9 has more or less kicked the bucket. The whole thing didn't go up in smoke or anything, but the microswitch on the left button has become somewhat unresponsive and making it register a click requires the strength of a thousand men. Which makes it a bit useless, really.
One could probably unscrew the whole thing, have a look at the switch, fix it, replace it, maybe just clean it and get it to work again, I don't know and frankly, I don't care enough to find out and risk breaking the whole thing even more in the process.

Now, one not so fantastic thing about being a freelance writer is that you can never say for sure when you'll get your hands on some disposable income. In theory, there should be a cozy 4-digit amount in my bank account, allowing me to replace whatever broken hardware I want. Reality check: Two employers haven't paid their oustanding bills to me yet, a third one would gladly pay me, but my article for them got delayed, because a game I was supposed to preview is virtually unplayable and the PR people, who could provide useful material and answer questions have gone on vacation. And I can't bill people for work I haven't yet completed. And of course having to make up for delayed cash flow means additional overdraft fees, late fees, yada, yada, yada. No money, no mouse.

So I went for the cheapest replacement I could get. Imagine going from this:

to this:

I'm shocked at how cool this thing actually looks on the picture.

This beauty costs a little over 8 Quid and is made of the thinnest, lightest, cheapest plastic they could roughly sculpt into the shape of a mouse. It is so light in fact, that I have to keep my hand on it at all times to prevent it from gently floating up into the air.
Now, while it does cover the most basic mousing needs (thumb buttons, wheel), there is no sidescroll-function. Something I've been using on the G9 for half a decade, so suddenly being unable to tilt the mouse wheel is more annoying than you'd think. On top of an ergonomical design, which was clearly created with no human being in mind and a stubborn mouse wheel coated with the slickest surface known on this side of the galaxy, to make scrolling entirely impossible. Sweet!

But I sucked it up. It's only temporary. Only until I'd get my money to buy a new mouse. Then the microswitch went funny. As in, 50% of my clicks wouldn't register at all, the other 50% were double-clicks. Go ahead! Try using a mouse, which registers nothing but double clicks! Click on the wrong savegame in Skyrim? Too fucking bad, it's a double-click and you're now overwriting it! Oh, you wanted to move this file somewhere else? Well, now you're gonna open it. And suddenly, the damn thing has become just as useless as the defective G9, whilst being twice as annoying.
But they can't all be shit, right? WRONG!
We own three of the damn things now. One has a faulty left button, the other one ceases to work when you twist the cord too much and the third one doesn't work at all. Ironically, the money we've spent on those shitty things could have bought us one working, expensive mouse.

Having no money and no functional mouse, I delved into the scary depths of hardware purgatory. Basically, that's a loose collection of old sound cards, hard drives, possibly entire motherboards, plugs, cables, converters, controllers, joysticks and sometimes mice. One of the horrible things that lurked inside was this:

The Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop

Another horrible pile of cheap, shitty plastic. I got it in a promotional press review package ages ago and it has never really worked at all. The "natural" ergonomic shape of the keyboard is a mess, the mouse feels rough and unpleasant and the cheap silvery coating dissolves within minutes of use and the whole damn thing is unresponsive and ugly and oversized and full of useless, stupid extra buttons nobody is ever going to use.
And of course the mouse just stayed dead when I plugged in the ridiculously oversized receiver. What a shame.
There was also a nondescript Logitech mouse, which was part of some old laptop ages ago. Didn't really do anything when I plugged it in. Why the fuck am I even keeping so many broken rodents around the house?

Oh well. Ended up finding an old favourite from 9 years ago.

I know. Why the hell would anyone want to fire up a playlist, skip tunes or change the volume setting using special mouse buttons, especially when one owns an old G15 Reloaded keyboard? I don't know. You can probably map other functions to all those fancy media buttons, but they're all located in such awkward places, you wouldn't map any vital gaming hotkeys to them.

But this mouse is almost perfect for me. It's very slim, which is good when you have small hands and makes it more comfortable to use than my broken G9, which is designed for people with hands the size of a bear. An actual bear, not a bear's hand... paw... whatever. The mousewheel can be tilted for sidescrolling (whoopie!) and doesn't get filthy and rusty like the G9's, there are nice, big, rubbery back and forward buttons and the whole thing feels nice and precise.
Like all cordless rodents, it eats batteries, which sucks. It also doesn't have any nifty buttons to change sensitivity in the middle of a game, which is a shame, but I've used this feature on the G9 about twice in my life. And I can't change any colours, meaning the buttons will always shine at me in a fancy, blue light, which is okay, because that's my favourite colour.

This was my favourite mouse back in the day. First expensive mouse I've ever spent any cash on and it felt a million times better than the bog-standard MS optical mouse I had used previously. Which isn't really a surprise. And one day I stepped on the wireless USB receiver and it all stopped working. So it went into purgatory with all the other broken, dodgy, outdated and spare hardware I had. Until last night.
Having tried all other options, I plugged in the dodgy old receiver for kicks and giggles. It has a massive crack in it, the USB connector is wobbly and dented and just dangling around like what I assume my cock will feel like in 50 years. "Logitech Wireless USB Input Device" it said in a little window as it installed the drivers. Whoa, surprise!

I had to disinfect the mouse before even trying to use it. Did you know that rubber can get mouldy? This mouse had grown all sorts of nasty things and was rather unpleasant to look at, let alone touch. But an intense cleaning session and a fresh pair of batteries later, the little buttons lit up and the ancient toy came back to life. Well... theoretically. Windows recognized the receiver, the mouse had power, but the pointer wouldn't move at all. Clicking didn't do anything. Neither did pressing the connection button on the mouse.
Oh well. Godzilla bless Google and PDF versions of old manuals. Turns out there's a tiny hole inside the USB receiver, which can be pressed with a pen to reset the whole thing. And that's what fixed it. So I had a perfectly functional, my favourite ever mouse, just sitting around for a half decade, because I thought it was fucked and I just couldn't get myself to throw it away.

Searching for drivers and a manual has also revealed that this thing is still being sold on Amazon today - for a whopping 150 Dollars!
By today's standards, the Logitech Mediaplay probably doesn't really qualify as a useful gaming mouse. There are probably much better alternatives for a fraction of the price. I don't even know what my past self was thinking when shelling out a ton of money for such a completely stupid, useless gadget!

But that's not the point. This is my favourite mouse! This is the one. The one that feels right, the one you don't have to get used to, that doesn't feel awkward, that has that one little stupid button you always press on accident or some shit like that, it's the perfect fucking mouse for me. The wheel feels perfect, the buttons need just the right amount of pressure, the shape, everything. Think of it as your favourite console's controller when you were a kid. I had Atari, C64, Sega, Nintendo, Nec and a billion other controllers before a Playstation or Xbox had even been invented. But for some reason, one of them would probably stand out and just feel right, one of them was better than all the rest, right? Some of my friends felt that way about arcade fightsticks, which have been enjoying a popular revival for quite some time, others say that the one true controller for them was the Gamecube Gamepad and so forth.

To most sane people, my resurrected mouse will look like an old, overpriced, slightly yucky piece of plastic. I gave it a quick test run on Neverwinter, fired up a pvp session and killed 20 people without dying. Which is mostly because I get all the most powerful stuff for free from the publisher and I've written all the guides and shit, but I'm sure the mouse has done its part to help. Like some old sword you've carried into battle a million times, it's now a bit rusty and looks a bit shit, but you'd still pick it over any new one, because they don't have the same balance, the same weight, the same feel to them. Which is also the cheesiest, nerdiest analogy possible.

I can't wait to use this in Skyrim. And Hawken. And everywhere else. But now I have another ten pages to complete for work. To finally get paid. On the plus side, I won't have to spend any of it on a new mouse now. Hurray!

-Cat